Various schemes and devices are employed in game machines, e.g., slot and pinball machines to provide presentation effects that appeal to a player's visual and auditory senses, or sense of touch to increase the player's interest in the game. A moving body such as a moving gadget may be provided in a game machine to provide a presentation effect that appeals particularly to a player's visual senses. A driving device such as a so-called stepping motor may drive this kind of moving body. A host control device and a stepping motor control circuit commands for rotating the setting during a predetermined direction coincides the moving body travels towards a specified location in accordance with the state of play. The host control device may be a processor unit used to provide presentation effects; hereafter such a device is referred to as the presentation CPU. The control circuit outputs a control signal to a drive circuit that drives the stepping motor; the control signal is responsive to the command received by the control circuit (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Publication No. 2013-51794).
The driving-device control apparatus described in JP 2013-51794A determines the displacement for the moving body on the basis of the difference between the destination for the moving body in the current position of the moving body received from the host control device (referred to as the presentation CPU) and drives the moving body on till the same arrives at the destination. Even if the host control device has no information on the present position of the moving body, the driving-device control apparatus described in JP 2013-51794A is capable of moving the moving body to a desired destination and reducing the processing load on the host control device.
In addition, a recent trend is to increase the number of moving bodies mounted in a game machine to increase a player's interest in the game. The number of motors needed to drive the moving bodies increases when the number of moving bodies mounted in the game machine increases. However, the space available behind the game machine is limited; therefore, the potential disadvantage is that complexity of arranging motors increases and the number of motors increases. Stepping motors in particular require multiphase magnetic control, and this complicated structure carries a correspondingly larger footprint. Moreover, a stepping motor is relatively expensive. Therefore, increasing the number of stepping motors is not ideal.
More large moving gadgets are mounted in the game machine to increase the player's interest. Driving this kind of moving gadget requires a high torque motor. However, the stepping motor must be a larger size to provide a higher torque; as a result, it tends to be more difficult to secure space to arrange the stepping motor.
In contrast, a direct-current (DC) motor is one kind of generally available device. The dc motor is cheaper than a stepping motor and even with the smaller footprint than a stepping motor is able to output the same amount of torque. Thus, one technique proposes making the moving body travel to a destination position using a dc motor and a rotation angle sensor, which outputs a detection signal every time the dc motor rotates a predetermined rotation angle (for example, refer to Japanese Patent Publication No. 2014-73024).